Letter from Paris

Liberté, Égalité, Agnès B.

HOME IS WHERE LE COEUR IS Agnès B. and friends at Le Coeur Volant (“The Flying Heart”), her house in Louveciennes, France, near Versailles.

Child of Versailles—and of the 1968 Paris student uprising—Agnès B. is a fashion tycoon who doesn’t know how much money she makes, whose vision is expressed as much through art and philanthropy as through her simple yet original clothes. In short, she accepts no limits.

There’s a rightness that it was she. When the outcome of a year-long French design competition was presented in the spring of 2008—a collection of versatile new uniforms for employees at the Palace of Versailles—the winning label seemed a fait accompli: agnès b.

It wasn’t simply that Agnès knew the grounds of this national treasure like the back of her hand, having grown up in the town that surrounds the 17th-century palace, the seat of the French court beginning with Louis XIV. Or that she was steeped in its art and architecture, having played in summer near the park’s Bassin de Neptune, bicycled in winter along its Grand Canal. It was that she, perhaps more than any other French designer working in fashion today, has an understanding of “rightness” that draws inspiration from both sides of the Versailles legacy: the classical proportions of aristocratic France, yes, but also the rebellion, the Revolution of 1789—its reach for democracy, its rejection of absolute rule by monarchy.

Absolute rule is not in Agnès’s lexicon. She is not the least bit interested in hot trends or in fashion as a badge of class. Agnès designs, she has often said, for people who have more important things to do than shop till they drop. She respects the haute couture and mourned the death in 2008 of Yves Saint Laurent. His last show, in 2002, is the one and only fashion show she’s ever attended. But regarding the let-them-eat-cake couture of recent years, she says, “I think it’s too easy.” In the blockbuster Grand Palais exhibition on Marie-Antoinette—up in Paris during the same month that Agnès’s Versailles collection was unveiled—the single piece of clothing in the show, the only piece that survived, is the young queen’s muslin shift. Graceful, simple, it could have come from agnès b.

On the strength of such simplicity, Agnès has built a fashion business that is an awesome global concern. She is often compared to Coco Chanel for her free spirit, her support of artists, and the sheer oomph of her empire—she’s one of the richest self-made women in France. Yet it is the way Agnès uses that empire, coloring outside the lines, that’s stunning. Since 1989, for instance, she has funded medical services in Côte d’Ivoire. In 1993 she began putting bowls of free condoms in her shops, no purchase necessary (she thought everyone would do this, but no one else did). With her son Etienne Bourgois, who directs the project, and to the tune of $1.2 million a year, she funds Tara, a boat that carries scientists and artists into the world’s oceans, where it collects precious data used to analyze climate issues. “We are one earth,” Agnès says, “six billion people. Soon it’s going to be seven billion. It’s my left side and my Catholic side. If we don’t share, it’s impossible.” Indeed, Agnès lives in a house that was commissioned by Louis XIV in 1710 and named Le Coeur Volant—“The Flying Heart.” It could appear on the coat of arms of Agnès B.

She was born Agnès Troublé on November 26, 1941, 50 meters from the royal grounds of Versailles. The house is on the corner where Rue du Maréchal Gallieni meets the Boulevard de la Reine. Six stories high, it is a vertical box with blistered white paint and shuttered windows, its severe posture echoed by a row of like houses—oyster, cream, buff, beige, pink. The Troublé family had an apartment on the second floor, and Agnès was the second child of four, three girls and finally a boy. Her earliest memory is of the war, “the bombs coming,” she says, “not far. I was in the corridor, and it was all black, even the shutters were with black paper.”

Her mother was the daughter of an officer and was educated at a strict boarding school. Her father was a bâtonnier, head of the Versailles bar association. They were a cultured couple—conservative, bourgeois—but they were not a match. “My father was very fond of art and music,” Agnès says. “He sang in the choir of the Paris Opéra. He was a very funny, very happy, very lovely man.” Her mother was not happy. “She had four children in five years. She was sometimes very nervous for nothing. And always annoying my father. They had their own relationships with other people.”

Agnès—called Agneau, “lamb,” by the family—was a good girl, busy, with the best penmanship in school and always raising her hand to volunteer when needed. Close to her father, she shared his love of art, and this love influenced her dream to one day be a museum curator. After class at the esteemed school Cours Gufflet, and on Saturdays too, she studied drawing at Versailles’s École des Beaux-Arts. She was optimistic, again like her father, and trusting of others. At the age of 12, when an older boy she knew from the family’s summers in Antibes—Christian Bourgois (pronounced with a hard g)—told her he would one day marry her, she believed him. Her mother, irritated by optimism, told Agnès to be quiet. But she did see her daughter’s character clearly: “My mother would say, ‘Mon Agneau never does anything like the others. I know she’s a rebel, but she’s very, very nice.’ ”

And by the time she was a teenager she was very, very beautiful. Agnès had breasts by 11, and with her blue eyes and Pre-Raphaelite blond hair, she had become fascinating to men. She felt, she has said, like prey. Later on, when Agnès read Lolita, “I understood better. I looked younger than I was, 14 when I was 18, the nymphet. That’s why I married so young. To escape.”

Thus, Agnès finished her last exam at Gufflet with an engagement ring on her finger. At 17, she married the handsome and brilliant Bourgois, who was 11 years older. It was a catch, and her parents were proud—he could have married anyone, but he chose Agneau.

Bourgois himself was something of a rebel. He defied paternal expectations by leaving a prestigious graduate school for civil-servant training to go into book publishing. He began with the great René Julliard, the publisher of Françoise Sagan, and later went on to start a company under his own name, publishing Salman Rushdie, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and William Burroughs. Agnès got pregnant soon after their wedding, and twin boys, Etienne and Nicolas, came in December of 1960. In the years before their birth, Agnès took a night course at the Louvre on classical painting, then worked with Jean Fournier, the owner of a gallery that showed abstract art. “I was trying to get closer to art since the beginning,” she says. Her idea to be a curator was still alive.

And then it and the marriage were over. When the twins were not yet one and Agnès was 19, she left. In years of interviews she has never explained why. Pushed on the subject, she will only say, “We were not at the same moment of our sex lives. I was so young, you know. He was 28 when I was 17. It’s very different.”

“They never said a word when they got divorced,” says Etienne Bourgois, one of the twins and today the director general-C.O.O. of Agnès B. “But they respected each other a lot. I think she just fell in love with someone else. When she gets in love with someone, she’s like a young girl.”

“She cannot lie,” says the photographer Dominique Nabokov, who is also a friend. “She won’t function if she’s not true to herself. It’s a great quality. Maybe it’s hard sometimes for [one’s] personal life.”

So while the divorce was both amicable and shocking—“In the 60s,” says Etienne, “getting a divorce after two years is something”—the bottom line was that Agnès, with a small pension from Bourgois, was on her own with twins to support.

“I had no money,” she says. So she sold her engagement ring, her wedding ring. “I didn’t want to ask anything from anyone. But I was happy with my boys. I started at Elle and then Dorothée Bis.”

It really was that simple. Soon after the couple split, Agnès was at a dinner party in a surplus khaki jacket, a flowered shirt, a skirt she’d cut short, and cowboy boots. This was her new style, flea market meets Prisunic (France’s answer to Woolworth’s, but with surprisingly chic clothes). An editor from Elle, Annie Rivemale, was taken by the getup—so offhand, négligée. After a trial assignment, Agnès was hired as a junior fashion editor. A year later, at the behest of Elie and Jacqueline Jacobson, the founders of Dorothée Bis, she crossed over and began designing.

It was not something Agnès ever had an ambition to do. But it came naturally to her, an instinct. “Dorothée Bis,” she says, “it was like a laboratory. They understood I had a vision for clothes that was maybe an advance.”

Agnès made a name for herself with Dorothée Bis, where she stayed for two years. She then went on to freelance for the French companies Cacharel, Limitex, Pierre d’Alby, and V de V. At Pierre d’Alby, recalls the writer and former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, “she was a star, because she was young and hip and cool and the clothes were exactly what you wanted to wear—as cool as Chinese uniforms.”

“She was designing at home,” remembers Etienne Bourgois, “bringing back a lot of samples, materials, and buttons. She was working for different companies, traveling a lot. And sometimes she was disappointed because she wanted to do something, a design, and the company changed it because it was too expensive, or they didn’t like it.”

But Agnès was finally living the way she wanted to. She and her boys had an apartment on top of the Montparnasse Station. The man she was involved with, an artist, began painting everything white, as if turning the place into a blank canvas. (A few years later, Agnès painted the apartment black.) “There were no chairs,” says Etienne. “We were living on the floor. In the early days Agnès wanted to be free, completely free. That’s a key point for her. Free form.” And though her name was more and more known, she was still paid only for the drawings that were actually put into production, which meant the check came months later. “Sometimes I had to return bottles,” she says, “to get two slices of ham.”

Hippie, liberal, flower child, rocker chick, radical.

“None of these terms by itself can define her,” says Jonas Mekas, writer, filmmaker, and a founder of New York’s Anthology Film Archives. “She is her own person.”

There’s no question that Agnès was powerfully influenced by the student uprising in Paris, in May 1968, a month in which the city shut down while young people demonstrated, calling for a new society, more open, less conservative. “I was with them,” she says. “We marched. There was the radio and we always knew where it was happening. I had the use of a car with no doors, a Mini Moke. So I took people who were hurt to the hospital.”

Instead of Cowboys and Indians her boys were playing Students and Policemen. Her parents were calling, imploring her to leave Paris. She stayed. And the experience stayed. “It was violent, but no one was killed. I remember the smell,” she says of the tear gas. “A very soft smell.”

She continued freelancing and in 1973 a phone call opened a small window. Elle was running a photo of a piece she’d designed for Limitex—how should she be credited? “They knew me as Agnès Bourgois. I said, Just say Agnès B. for Limitex. I didn’t want to use my husband’s name.” Because he was using it. She decided to make it official and registered the name in lowercase. “I prefer the minor,” she says. “The minor is simpler than the major.”

Personally, too, the early 70s brought change. Agnès had been living with a man named Philippe Michel, a founder of a prominent French ad agency. They’d had a child together, a girl, Ariane. “Philippe Michel was very, very sharp in his world,” says Etienne, “very creative. But maybe too classic for her.” It didn’t help that Agnès had a philosophical aversion to advertising. “He was a great man,” says Agnès, “great at advertising. But I hate advertising. And I met Jean-René and it was like [handclap] powwww.”

Jean-René de Fleurieu. The Pre-Raphaelite angel had found her flower (and her second husband). “He had the face of Saint Sebastian,” Agnès says, “but he’s a Renaissance guy too. He was 23 and I was 32.”

“He was long hair, barefoot in Paris, motorbike—fantastic guy,” says Etienne Bourgois. “He was a dreamer like her. They understood each other very well.”

Jean-René had quite a pedigree. He came from a very old family—les Fleurieu. Through his mother he was connected to the famous journalistic family Servan-Schreiber, whose aura in France is like that of the Kennedys in America. And his stepfather was Pierre Mendès-France, who’d been a left-wing premier of France. When Agnès met Jean-René he was working with the eminent Félix Guattari, in a clinic for the insane. He also happened to be quite entrepreneurial.

“I didn’t know I would do a shop,” says Agnès. “It’s because I met Jean-René and I said, It’s boring to design for whoever, to design things you won’t like. And he said, Let’s do a shop.”

So it was a lark. In fact, birds flew free in the first shop. “Babies born in little nests near the window,” Agnès recalls. “The birds put threads from the dresses inside the nests.” And the space was located in no-man’s-land—Les Halles, 1976—on Rue du Jour, under the looming, magnificent Saint-Eustache cathedral. The shop had been a butchery, and it didn’t change much. “It was very cool,” she says. “We were writing on the walls.” White walls, naturally, ready for anything.

“When I first found agnès b.,” recalls Penelope Rowlands, author of the Carmel Snow biography, A Dash of Daring, “I’d never seen anything like that in Paris. The store was huge. It was cavernous. And there were just a few articles of clothing dotted around, with huge amounts of space between them. And there were big, poster-size photographs of her with her twins. It was like going to Biba used to be in London. I mean, you knew you were at the center of the world somehow.”

And the first collection to grace that shop? “It was completely inspired by classic workers’ uniforms,” says Agnès. She engaged a French manufacturer, a company that specialized in uniforms for painters, plasterers, waiters—which meant overalls, loose pants, short jackets. She tweaked the designs, streamlining them for streetwear, and had them done up in worn, white cotton. And then “we dyed them in many colors. Pink, red, sometimes pale blue. And people were taking them even wet, you know? They were buying them wet.”

“It was new color in two days and putting them in the shop,” says Etienne, who helped on weekends and joined the company in 1979. “It was fantastic, positive.”

It was also subtly political. Workers clothes for everyone. Fashion with a democratic accent. Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

“It’s almost a kind of radical socialist thing,” explains Joan Juliet Buck, “that informed fashion and design when ready-to-wear started in France in the 60s. These very brilliant women, Maïmé Arnodin and Denise Fayolle, had a trend-forecasting and consulting firm called Mafia that was informed by a kind of Protestant, socialist ethic. These two women did the first clothes sold at Prisunic, along with furniture. It was really good design for the masses at really good prices—years before H&M and Zara or fashion at Target. And Agnès belongs to that kind of aesthetic. It’s never about showing off. It’s just about having proper clothes that make you look good.”

Soon agnès b. had a whole slew of its own classics. Long- and short-sleeved T-shirts done in striped Rugby cotton. Iconic white shirts and timeless black pants. Carefree dresses with mignon touches such as tiny buttons, pin pleats. Buttery-leather jackets that looked born, not stitched. And her massively copied best-seller, the snap cardigan of 1979, made of sweatshirt cotton and fastened with a long row of snaps. Agnès has given various explanations of its genesis: a priest’s cassock; an 18th-century frock coat; a sweatshirt she slit down the front when it was too hot. “I was always working in a white sweatshirt,” she says. As for the other two explanations: “They [both] have buttons very close.” In 1996, the Pompidou Center put on an exhibition: “Photographers and the Snap Cardigan.” To date, two million of these cardigans have been sold.

So while the clothes are simple, the silhouettes are imbued with everything Agnès knows and loves—French history, French film, the French schoolgirl, the French fawn (those beautiful young men unique to France)—all swiftly sketched and utterly right. “When you go to Agnès’s office you don’t see so much,” says one of her assistants. “She has everything in her head.”

“I first heard the name Agnès B.,” remembers the writer Holly Brubach, formerly the style editor of The New York Times, “from friends who were photographers and writers, who traveled a lot between Paris and New York. Her clothes were right for the kind of lives they had. So there was a casual quality to what they were wearing, but there was still an elegance about it—sort of dress-down as opposed to dress-up.”

Which is why agnès b. attracts clients of like mind, kindred spirits such as David Bowie and Gérard Depardieu (whose presence you feel in her atelier: his topstitched black overcoat stands on a dress form near the door), Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and James White and Robert De Niro. Her clothes appear, without fanfare, in many movies: her “Harvey” pants are named for Harvey Keitel, who wore agnès b. in Reservoir Dogs, and David Lynch puts his actors in Agnès (and wears her himself). Chet Baker wore agnès b. in the documentary Let’s Get Lost, as did Uma Thurman and John Travolta in the Pulp Fiction Twist competition. Going from trad to rad, she’s dressed the mayor of Paris and the illusionist David Blaine, who wore agnès b. while living in a box for 44 days. “He wants people to understand,” she says, “that their limits are much further than they think. I like this idea.”

In 1980, Agnès opened a store in New York City, in a forlorn part of town called SoHo, so dirty Agnès still remembers the dust. “It was very black. I thought, This is New York. Like The Asphalt Jungle.” She loved that black dust and the rebel energy that went with it—CBGB, punk, downtown art and dance. The shop was wide open, like in Paris, with movie posters on the walls and a plainness that was bracing.

“Agnès b. opened in SoHo and I just about had a heart attack,” says Kim Hastreiter, a co-editor and publisher of Paper magazine. “I don’t know if you remember, but you used to go to the supermarket and somebody made generic packaging—just white with black letters on it. Rice. I thought it was so chic-looking. Agnès b. reminded me of that, because everything was black and white—it was almost generic. The clothing was very undecorative, yet it had a real sophistication behind it. And what happened was, when I was trying to start Paper and we had meetings for like a year, what Paper would become, I just kept saying, Paper needs to be like agnès b., kind of generic. As plain as a glass of water.”

As more stores opened, Agnès didn’t limit herself to clothes. She kept growing, but not in terms of licensing—most of those many offers she’s turned down. No, she returned to her first love. In 1984, next door to her first shop, she and Jean-René opened the Galerie du Jour, an unpretentious space in which she showed the work of offbeat artists she admired, and also sold books published by Christian Bourgois. It was another lark, and also ballsy, considering the French tendency to skepticism. “They don’t like people to do different things, like me,” says Agnès. “So I came inside the world of art on tiptoe, because I had a big handicap being a stylist and making a gallery. Now they understand. Now they take me very seriously.”

Galerie du Jour evolved. “Very quickly her gallery became quite specialized for photography,” says a well-placed fashion insider. “It’s major, what she did for photographers.” And Agnès has become a matriarch, a mentor for young artists, advising and exhibiting them. “She takes her chances with the young and new and different,” says Jonas Mekas. Her love of film led Agnès to form Love Streams, a production company that helps independent filmmakers bring their work to market. She does not shy away from difficult or subversive art.

“She has two families,” says Etienne Bourgois. “Us, but I think the great family for her is the artist world.”

The photographer Bruce Weber compares Agnès to Jean Cocteau. “He had these circles of friends, people coming in and out of his life. Painters, filmmakers. He was interested in people and he wasn’t a snob. A great thing about Agnès is that she’s not a snob.”

She’s not an ego either. “She doesn’t function like a business person functions,” says the writer and director Harmony Korine, who is close to Agnès, and whose controversial films she has supported. “She’s an artist. There’s a unified aesthetic to what she does. She goes off a rhythm and a feeling and an intuition. She doesn’t really have fears. And her eye is spectacular.”

Andy Spade and his wife, Kate, discovered agnès b. around 1986, before they’d created their handbag company, Kate Spade. “What she did so well,” says Andy Spade, “and inspired me to even get into fashion, which I wasn’t really interested in as a business—she was able to explore all of her loves through her business. And that actually helped her communicate what she was trying to say as a designer. I felt like, Wow, I could do that. I don’t have to have these separate passions. She made it all about her love.”

Agnès is not a morning person. Her usual work hours are noon to nine. “I like the night,” she says. “I did a T-shirt with ‘J’adore la nuit’—I love night.” On the day of our second Paris interview, she doesn’t get to the office until three in the afternoon, because she was up till four with friends the night before. Which is impressive, considering her age. She’s now 69 and has an empire on her shoulders: 282 stores and 2,000 employees around the world.

She’s wearing a long linen redingote, royal purple, from a 2005 collection, and it plays marvelously with her pink cheeks and the solid-blue intensity of her eyes. Bleu à la reine, her mother called the color: queen’s blue. Agnès is a kind of queen—a fairy queen, perhaps—with her flaxen hair, which falls in waves ending in ringlets. It’s a grand-mère’s face now. She had two daughters with Jean-René—Aurore and Iris—which makes five children altogether, and 14 grandchildren. But you can still see the hippie princess she once was. The silver ring she wears says, GIVE LOVE.

Agnès continues to design every last item that bears her name, eight collections a year, but she does so much more than that. She designed the interiors for a residential building in Osaka, Japan, a serene, jewel-toned take on Morocco. She hopes to sell Jean-René’s olive oil, produced at his château and wonderfully redolent of wheatgrass. (He’s no longer her husband, but they remain close.) In 2008, JRP/Ringier published a book showcasing her vast photography collection.

“In my collection there’s a lot of photography of young people,” she says. “I love people at the time they are making themselves, becoming themselves.” In portraits, she prefers the subject to be looking out of the frame. “In advertising they all look into the frame. There is something respectful when the photographer takes a picture of someone who is not exactly in the frame.” This is actually a wonderful metaphor for everything agnès b. is about: clothes that respect the people who wear them—people who look, and sometimes live, outside the frame.

She is still as optimistic as ever. “Success didn’t change her,” says Etienne. “She has the same creed. She still thinks we can change the world.”

And when asked about his mother’s relationship to her wealth, he says, “She doesn’t know how much she’s making.” Really? “Yes. She doesn’t care so much. For her, it’s to share.”

When it comes to the future, Agnès says she does not plan, because she has never planned. “I believe in natural stories. I’m sure I will find sometime a girl or a boy who designs and we could work together for a while. It happens when it happens, you know?”

Agnès’s Galerie du Jour is now located at 44 Rue Quincampoix, two blocks from the Pompidou Center. You enter from a skinny Parisian street into a tiny gallery and bookstore. A much larger gallery space, high-ceilinged and as cool as a mosque, is secreted farther back, beyond a small courtyard. On this day, it is a work in the tiny front gallery that seems to speak for Agnès.

On a video monitor a short film is repeating in a loop. It shows a young man standing at an open window, high in an empty brick building. The sky is celestial. The young man folds a piece of paper into an airplane. He throws it, and the white form dives and twirls, dives and twirls, and then spirals out of sight.

Is imaginative flight really so close at hand? Is freedom as near as a wide blue sky? For Agnès and her flying heart, the answer is always yes.